


Spring Floods

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: Herald - Soldier - Priest [6]
Category: Highlander
Genre: GFY, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-05
Updated: 2011-06-05
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another sheet, and another sketch, details drawn from old memories of people and place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spring Floods

The place seems nothing special, just a mountain valley with a swift-running stream tumbling down the center. But for him, there's a grandeur in the bones of the slopes rising around him, a familiarity in the chattering stream, that there is nowhere else. Even as modern life cloaks the familiar in new clothes, he can still see the shape of it beneath. There, where they grazed sheep and horses on summer meadows, and where his family set up tents to protect them from rain and sun alike.

Haerviu settles on an exposed rock well up the slope, looking down over the valley laid out before him. Fingers curled loosely around a stick of charcoal, eyes seeing the place as it had been rather than as it is. Setting memory to the page, dark lines sketched over pale paper, shadows smudged with careful fingertips.

Another sheet, and another sketch, details drawn from old memories of people and place. A lifetime long lost to the passage of time, details that even now historians and archeologists alike seek to find. They'd call his sketches and stories a fiction, a fantasy conjured up to romanticize the time and people.

Perhaps they're even right, in some part of that. He is only human, regardless of the length of his life, and likes to remember the best parts of life, and forget the hardships. Remember that his mother and father loved him, rather than their funeral pyres. That he'd had a beautiful wife and fine sons and daughters, not that he couldn't make a family of his own flesh and blood.

He can, after all, think of them and not feel a hollow inside of him any longer where love for them once blossomed, full of fire and life. A mortal life that had left him behind in a spring flood, saving his youngest daughter before he'd been struck by something in the water. Even now, he cannot remember if it might have been a tree or a boulder, only that if he'd been a moment slower, he would not have been the only one dead.

Setting his charcoal aside, he studies his sketches a moment, a smile crossing his face. He carefully enfolds each in a sheet of newsprint to protect them and the portfolio into which he nestles them. He'll display them in the privacy of this lifetime's home, to select friends and potential patrons, though he won't sell any of these. He may wish for others to see his mortal life though his eyes, but he's not willing to let them go.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: **Noble** (#585/1000)


End file.
